I've tried this many times over my career and its never stuck. I have terrible hand writing and I suck at taking hand written notes.
I do however swear by keeping notes digitally and I have for well over 5 years now. I keep a daily worklog of what I'm doing. I reference it pretty often. I do it all in plain text and sync it using Syncthing to my various devices (except iOS which is annoying). I'm a big plain text maxi. They have a post discussing their note taking process.
But, what has worked for me is using paper for diagramming architectures for systems and application stacks. I started doing this with designing web sites info architecture back in the day and have used it ever since. Index cards are a great tool for that work. White boards are also very helpful.
I do find that using non-digital tools opens up another part of my brain. I need to do it more.
I am not a developer but I always have a pen and notebook beside me. I don't mind taking digital notes if I am on the go but I prefer written.
My main reason for sticking to digital notes is that I don't lose them and I can search them up later. If I could somehow search my handwritten notes and have them automatically uploaded to the cloud, I'd stick to handwriting.
Do you hand written note folks ever back up those notebooks by digitizing them?
No I just keep the notebooks.
I used to carry a small stack of index cards and a space pen everywhere I went. These days I don't. I take most notes on a Linux machine and sometimes my GrapheneOS phone. I mostly read notes on my phone though.
I don't have a precise way of taking notes, and that's bad.
I use a blank vscode page to lay out my thinking and sometimes I also re-write it on sticky notes or A4s from the printer.
At the end of the day I have 10 sticky notes and 3-4 plain text files and to understand something you have to connect all the pieces lol.
Lately I've been eyeing some small digital whiteboards, they're super cheap on aliexpress but I can't comment on their quality (maybe non-existent)
I have a tablet for this with obsidian and concepts, writing really solves half the problem. Whiteboards are cool too.
I like taking notes and the idea of taking notes, but I struggle with keeping a consistent system and habit.
Got stuff scattered all over like 3 different note taking apps and a few in random notepad/txt files
Short notes, blurbs, random thoughts and ideas, copy pasta, code snippets for solving that one weird USB port issue on Ubuntu 16.04 almost a decade ago...
I know some folks swear by the fancy full feature note takers like Obsidian and that other one where you write thoughts and draw lines to relate them. Maybe I gotta give it a serious shot sometime.
I often have the mental block that spending too much effort in note taking and organizing them, fully learning to use a note taking app or system efficiently is somehow unproductive time. I know I'm probably wrong though.